The post includes an example of code that can create the menu and its options. It also shows how you can change the look of the default menu, changing colors, the "selected" marker, padding and width. The package makes use of the php-school/cli-menu package for a lot of the base menu rendering and functionality.

Robert Basic has shared a quick tip for the Composer users out there (you do use Composer, right?) showing how to exclude certain packages from updates without having to whitelist packages all the time.

Given that Composer has no --exclude flag or similar, the only other option is to create a list of packages we allow to be updated, excluding the ones we don’t want to be updated. We need to create a whitelist.

Creating it manually would be a PITA though, especially if there’s a lot of packages to include or exclude. CLI to the rescue!

He includes a command that grabs the packages from the current composer info listing (using grep, sed, cut and paste). He walks through the command showing how it works to pull the package information out. With the help of the -v option for grep it's easy to remove certain items from the list (blacklist) and to provide a string back to composer that can then be used to update only the remaining packages.

In a new post to his site Rob Allen talks about getting up and running with "serverless PHP" using the Apache OpenWhisk cloud platform that executes as events are fired rather than sitting as an entire application.

I've been interested in Apache OpenWhisk for a little while now and recently submitted a new feature to add PHP support to the project. As OpenWhisk is a serverless environment, most users do not run their own copy and instead use a commercial provider with IBMs Bluemix available now along with Adobes I/O Runtime and RedHat coming soon. As a result, my contribution, isn't practically useful until it's in production with a provider.

Fortunately, and remarkably quickly, IBM have added support for PHP to the Bluemix "IBM Cloud Functions" platform, so now we can use PHP to develop serverless applications and deploy them into the wild! This is a rebranding, so you'll see this referred to as "Bluemix OpenWhisk" around the web too.

He walks you through the setup of an account on the bluemix.net service and how to install OpenWhisk locally rather than the IBM "Bluemix CLI" tool. He then shares the code to create a simple "Hello World" function in PHP (7.1) and push it up to your account. He then executes the action from the command line, returning his JSON formatted greeting. Next he shows how to set this function up as a web action and give it a URL for the outside world to access. He finishes the post with some examples of calling the URL and how it would receive parameters via a POST or a GET.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from author Claudio Ribeiro that wants to re-introduce you to the Symfony Console package, a component of the larger Symfony framework that makes it easier to create and work with command-line PHP scripts.

As software developers, we often feel the need to resort to command line tools. These kinds of tools are helpful when we need to do a sort of recurring task like migrating data, performing imports, or creating cron jobs.

The Symfony Console component tool provides us with a simple framework to create our own command line tools. Unlike many components in Symfony, this is a standalone package and is used by the likes of Laravel‘s Artisan and many other famous PHP packages.

The tutorial then walks you through the installation process, via Composer, and the creation of a new command. With this simple base created, he then adds in actual functionality, building out a command to hash and verify a password string. They show how to use the command and an example of its output. Next up, he creates another command example, this time verifying the password hash provided as an argument. The tutorial wraps up with a look at testing your console comamnds with PHPUnit tests via the included CommandTester functionality.

Loïc Faugeron has posted another in his "ultimate guide" series of posts around components in the Symfony framework. In this latest post he gives an example of using the command line component with the Console component.

Finally we've started to put all this knowledge in practice by creating a "fortune" project with: an endpoint that allows us to submit new fortunes, a page that lists all fortunes.
In this article, we're going to continue the "fortune" project by creating a command that prints the last fortune.

zend-expressive does not come out of the box with a console for handling cli commands. However it's easy to add this and make full use of the container and its dependencies.

He uses the Symfony console component to handle most of the "heavy lifting" with the command line interaction, pulled in via Composer. He shows the process for getting the component installed and how to create the "bootstrap" file needed to build an instance of the Application class. He follows this with a simple "greeting" command including the configuration to add a few arguments and output the simple "Hello" message. He then creates the functionality to wire it in to the Zend Expressive application and gives an example of it in use.

I have always been a big fan of console commands and I try to provide a command line interface (CLI) as much as possible in most of my PHP projects. In this article, I’ll briefly compare three PHP console command libraries.

He starts with a brief history on each of the libraries, talking about their origins and age. He then talks about the necessary dependencies each requires and the overall complexity of the code they include. Next up is some practical examples putting each to use outputting a simple message back to the user using user input for both the message and output color.

Michelangelo van Dam has a quick new post to his site talking about popen and pipes in command-line PHP as an alternative to the "exec" functions PHP provides to make command lines calls.

I got a question today about using commands that pipe output to other commands within PHP applications. There are two functions in PHP that are perfect for the task: popen and proc_open. But when you want to run it as a complete process, you can go about using exec, shell_exec, passthru or system and fiddle with escapeshellcmd. But often this looks messy and not reusable. A better approach would be to use "popen".

He includes a code example of how to use this method, showing a call to a command line tool and piping the results back into a PHP variable for later use. You can find out more about the use of popen in the PHP manual and accompanying examples.

The SitePoint blog has a new post from Daniel Gafitescu covering the use of the Symfony Console component to create command line PHP scripts quickly and easily.

As a PHP developer, you will often find yourself working with PHP in the command line. The first time I had to use it was because I would get the "Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded" error on a shared server where you could not change the max_execution_time PHP setting. Nowadays building command line scripts is much easier than it used to be. If you search on Packagist you will find a lot of packages to work with the command line but the one that stands out and is the most commonly used is Symfony/Console.

He starts with what you'll need to add to your Composer configuration to pull in a development version (2.4.x-dev) of the component. With that installed, he sets up a base directory ("/app") and a basic skeleton for your application. For his first command, he creates a script that will calculate the fibonacci numbers between two given numbers. He shows how to work with the input and Output objects inside the script and the code for the finished command - including some screenshots of the output.

Most of the PHP I write these days is CLI scripts. I really wanted to be able to trap signals in some of my scripts. I struggled with this for a while; I even spent an entire weekend googling and reading only to find out that most of the information out there was either wrong, confusing, or incomplete. I decided that once I figured it out, I was going to put everything I learned together in one place to help others that were struggling with this topic as well.

The eBook is available for purchase and download now at a suggested price of only $5 USD. If you've been looking for a quick, concise guide to using process control in PHP, you should check it out.